What did five hundred merit points mean?
For Su Jinxiu, it was no less than winning the grand prize lottery in the 21st century.
Like a miser, she sank her consciousness into the system panel in the dead of night, counting the numbers over and over again, afraid it was a system glitch.
After confirming everything was correct, she could barely suppress the urge to roll around in bed.
“System, upgrade.”
With a crisp electronic chime, the once cramped emergency space—no bigger than a coffin shop—underwent a dramatic transformation.
The white light faded. What appeared was no longer that crude operating interface, but a spacious, bright, almost dazzling intermediate surgical room.
Shadowless lamps hung overhead like giant eyes. Beside them stood a slightly old but fully functional ventilator. Even the instrument cabinet in the corner had been upgraded to stainless steel, neatly stocked with brand-new hemostatic forceps and surgical knives.
Most importantly, the neuroconduction detector that had previously shown “insufficient permissions” was now active.
Su Jinxiu suddenly opened her eyes and sat up from the bed.
It was just dawn outside. The rooster’s crow sounded weak and tired.
Huo Chen was still asleep—or pretending to be.
“Husband! Wake up!” Su Jinxiu slapped his exposed shoulder. “Stop sleeping, I’ve got something important to do!”
Huo Chen’s eyelids twitched and slowly lifted.
There was no grogginess in his eyes. Instead, they were frighteningly clear, carrying a trace of irritation at being disturbed.
“The house collapsed?” he asked.
“Something more important than that!” Su Jinxiu didn’t give him a chance to refuse. She directly grabbed his waistband and started pulling.
In that instant, Huo Chen’s reaction was pure instinct—his wrist flipped, fingers already gripping the hidden dagger beneath the pillow.
“Su Jinxiu, what nonsense are you up to now?” His voice was hoarse from sleep, low and warning. “Want to lose your hands this early in the morning?”
“I want them, I want them—I still need them to support you in old age,” she replied nonsense as usual, casually rolling up his pant leg all the way to his thigh.
“Let me take a look.”
Huo Chen: “……”
This woman’s shamelessness was becoming more and more outrageous.
Before he could kick her off the bed, her hand was already on his lower back.
Unlike her usual forceful massages, this time her touch was light—like playing piano—probing along each vertebra.
Her expression was also different. No more teasing, only focus.
Huo Chen swallowed back the curse that had been about to come out.
In Su Jinxiu’s vision, the X-ray scanning ability combined with the system’s upgraded detector was operating at full power.
Lines of pale blue data flashed across her sight.
【Lumbar vertebra L4–L5 old compression fracture, good callus formation.】【Sciatic nerve conduction speed: 35 m/s (below normal but responsive).】【Femoral nerve signal: weak, not fully severed.】【Muscle atrophy level: Grade II, reversible.】
Her fingers paused above his knee.
There was a scar there—ugly and old, as if pierced by a weapon.
“Here. Does it hurt?” she pressed.
Huo Chen frowned slightly and gave a low grunt.
“No feeling.”
“And here?”
Her finger moved down slightly, pressing harder into an acupoint.
At that instant, a faint sensation—like ants biting—suddenly crawled along the long-dead nerve pathway.
So weak, so unfamiliar… yet real.
Huo Chen’s entire body jolted.
He suddenly looked up, staring at her.
“Did you feel it?” Su Jinxiu’s eyes lit up instantly, like a fox that had stolen a chicken.
“Numb? Or sore?”
Huo Chen’s throat moved slightly.
“…Numb.”
“Bingo!”
She snapped her fingers, excitement practically bursting out of her.
“I knew it! Your leg isn’t废—it’s just asleep!”
She jumped off the bed and paced around the room, muttering to herself.
“No nerve rupture… if we do a nerve decompression surgery, combined with intensive acupuncture and rehabilitation… I can’t promise a marathon, but restoring eighty to ninety percent function? Walking without a cane is absolutely possible!”
Huo Chen sat on the bed, pant leg still rolled up to his thigh. That leg—long cold and lifeless—was exposed to the air.
He listened in silence.
“Recover eighty to ninety percent.”
“No need for a cane.”
These words struck him like a heavy hammer against a stagnant heart.
“Are you serious?” he asked finally.
His voice was low, restrained, as if suppressing something on the verge of erupting.
Su Jinxiu stopped pacing, returned to the bed in two steps, and leaned in between his arms, face very close.
“Husband,” she said earnestly, blinking her eyes. “When have I ever lied to you?”
“I may cheat money and feelings, but when it comes to saving lives—I never joke.”
“You are… our family’s pillar.”
“If you can’t stand up, who’s going to fight for me in the future?”
“Who’s going to carry my money bag?”
Huo Chen looked at the face right in front of him.
Her skin wasn’t particularly good—slightly dark, with a bit of dust still stuck on the tip of her nose from earlier.
When she said those words, her eyes were full of calculations, full of that kind of “if you recover I can make more money” mercenary thinking.
Yet for some reason, this kind of blatant exploitation made it feel… incredibly real.
“If it can’t be cured?” Huo Chen asked.
“Then we cut it off and replace it with an iron one. It’ll still work.” Su Jinxiu answered without hesitation. “We can even install a mechanical prosthetic with mechanisms—each step fires an arrow. Super flashy.”
Huo Chen couldn’t help it. The corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.
He raised a hand—not to push her away this time—but to roughly move aside her head that was almost poking his nose.
“What do you need?”
“Money. A lot of money.”
Su Jinxiu instantly switched back into her housekeeper mode.
“Medicinal herbs cost money, equipment costs money… no, special tools cost money. And your nutrition has to improve too. Pork offal isn’t enough anymore. You need beef and bone soup.”
She counted on her fingers, the more she calculated, the tighter her brows knit together.
Huo Chen looked at her money-obsessed expression, his fingers unconsciously brushing the leg that had started to regain sensation.
The numb, aching feeling had already faded.
But something called “hope” was now growing wildly inside him like untamed weeds.
He raised his head and looked at Su Jinxiu, who was still muttering about “seems like we need to plant two more mu of medicinal herbs.”
For the first time, his voice carried something that could be called… indulgence.
“I’ll figure out the money.”
“What can you even figure out?” Su Jinxiu didn’t even look up. “Go hunt birds again? Or rob someone on the roadside?”
“Either way, I won’t let you go hungry.”
Su Jinxiu chuckled and burrowed back into the bedding, clinging to his uninjured leg like some soft-bodied creature.
“Then I’ll just wait for my husband to take me flying.”
Sunlight filtered through the paper window, falling over both of them.
At that moment, in the shabby thatched hut, the long-standing gloom and deathly stillness seemed to fade away a little.
Only Su Jinxiu didn’t know—
That single act of “reviving dead wood” she had done wasn’t just saving a leg.
She was pulling back a man who would one day become a Shura that shook the entire world.